The list of VNFs at the OPNFV website contains 9 Open Source and 5 proprietary VNFs available to them. Of the 9 the most impressive from a Telco perspective is Clearwater vIMS which provides IMS Functionality in a VNF package. This is the VNF that is used during MWC 2016 to demo the OSM project by ETSI as well. They make a SIP call using it.

ETSI has launched the OSM Project ( https://osm.etsi.org/ ) to take the focus of innovation away from Management and Orchestration and keep it on the VNFs. The VNFs are the building blocks of network services and as such they are glued together to provide communication services.

Much of the work and innovation will be on efficient VNF internal design and efficient Network Services design. The Network Services design is a network designe or network architects duty while good and efficient VNF’s are provided by software engineers.

All in all two base skills appear to be handy. One is Linux as base technology for managing infrastructure, providing hypervisor functionality, as base OS within VNFs and also as base OS for VNFM’s as well. Second will be good Network Service design where with increasing amount of VNFs becoming available piecing them together to provide communication services given the constraints put by the system will be a skill.